Squeezing the Orange. Henry Blofeld
could be great value. He had a wonderful turn of phrase. He and Grizel would go to bed every night at around ten o’clock. Sitting in the drawing room at the Home Farm, or later in the hall at Hoveton House, he would shut his book, half stretch, and say, ‘Well, I think it’s time for a bit of a lie-down before breakfast.’ Another splendid offering would come when a visitor was over-keen to make a favourable impression. When asked what he thought about whoever it was when he had gone, Tom would say, ‘Awfully nice. I do just wish he wouldn’t fart above his arsehole quite so much.’
There was one incident when I was young for which I never forgave Tom. I always ate with Nanny in the nursery, but I was allowed to have lunch in the dining room with my parents on the last full day of the school holidays – I was sent to boarding school at Sunningdale when I was seven and a half. And not only that: I was allowed to choose the pudding. One year Grizel came by a stock of tinned black cherries, and whenever I tasted them I didn’t think I would ever get much closer to heaven. Goodness knows where she found them. Anyway, on this occasion I said I would like some black cherries as the pud, and to my surprise my wish was granted. We sat down to lunch at one o’clock – mealtimes were immutable, and if you were late it was considered to be a major crime. Tom carved the cold beef. They had cold roast beef six days a week, or so it seemed, and to ring the changes, hot roast beef on Sundays. A woman called Joan, who ferried these things around in the dining room, put my plate in front of me, and when everyone had been served, we tucked in. Our empty plates were collected, and then it was time for the cherries.
They were brought in by Joan on a large brown tray, and put down on the sideboard. As well as the big glass bowl brimful of cherries, there was another full of junket, that ghastly milk jelly which I detested with a passion. Tom got up to serve us, and in addition to a pretty useful pile of cherries, I was given two big spoonfuls of junket. We were brought up to ‘eat level’, which meant that junket and cherries had to be eaten together. But on this occasion I threw caution to the winds and, feigning great enthusiasm, got stuck into the junket, which I finished in record time. My undisturbed pile of cherries was now gleaming up at me from my plate. The next five minutes looked promising. But Tom had been watching.
‘Joan,’ he said, for she was still lurking by the sideboard, ‘Master Henry’ – I was always Master Henry as far as the staff were concerned – ‘clearly does not like his cherries. Will you please remove them.’ Which is what she did, and I have only just stopped crying. Life could be bloody unfair, or so it seemed. But I had broken the rules.
In the fifties Tom bought an old Rolls-Royce from a chap who lived in the neighbouring village of Coltishall. It was a bespoke model, and was thought to be one of the last Rolls made with a red ‘RR’ on the front of the bonnet – the change to black was made in 1933, for aesthetic reasons. It was a huge, pale-grey car with a soft roof which never came off, as far as I know. There was a window between the back and the front seats which could be wound up by those in the back so the chauffeur couldn’t do any eavesdropping. As Tom always drove it himself this window remained down and was not to be touched. I thought it was the sexiest car ever, because it had no fewer than three horns. One was a gentle toot for warning an old woman against crossing the road; the next was a bit stronger, in case she had already started; and the third was a klaxon which yelled at her just as she was disappearing under the wheels. ‘Bloody fool,’ Tom would mutter after he had pressed it.
My father used the Rolls as his main car for at least ten years, and it always caused my school chums great amusement when he drove it down to Eton. He was the Chairman of the Country Gentleman’s Association, and the number plate was CG 1000, so he was known by my friends as ‘Country Gent One Thousand’. As it was such a big car he sometimes had difficulty negotiating the smaller streets in London, but it was such an imperious-looking machine that almost everyone got out of the way. If not, there was much hooting, which occasionally got to the klaxon stage. Although parking in those days was a great deal easier than it is now, it still presented problems in the busy parts of London. But Tom, whose appearance was nothing if not distinguished, had the answer to that. He would drive slowly down, say, Bond Street, and when he saw two coppers walking along the pavement – as one did in those far-distant days – he would stop the car, get out and shut the door, saying to the nearest one, ‘Officer, look after my car for me. I shall only be about ten minutes,’ and walk off. When he returned they would indeed be looking after his car. I always wondered who they thought he was.
In many ways Grizel was the antithesis to Tom. She was short, although there was a fair bit of her in the horizontal sense, and she packed a pretty good punch. She went around like a battleship under full steam, with a siren to match. A woman of the most forthright and damning opinions, with a fund of common sense, she did not tolerate what she described as nonsense in any shape or form, and was quick to spot anything remotely bogus. In turn, you had to accept her as she was. She was very bright, and had a marvellous sense of humour. She was a reasonably devout Christian, and church – where Tom read the lessons, and was joint patron of the living together with the Bishop of Norwich – was an essential part of Sundays. As a child, I always felt the time spent in church could have been more usefully employed. Grizel, sensing my objections, would say to me, ‘You’ve had a lovely week. Now you can spend an hour saying thank you.’ She was fond of God, but dealt with him entirely on her own terms. When they eventually met I should think a good deal of finger-wagging of the ‘now, look here’ sort will have gone on.
In 1956 we moved up the drive from the Home Farm to Hoveton House. There was a dinner party soon afterwards, and one of my parents’ friends who came along was what people today would refer to as a born-again Christian. In those days he was known as a God-botherer. He loved to get stuck into his neighbour’s ribs and start banging on about God. While she was all for the general idea of converting people, Grizel felt there was a time and place for everything, and that a dinner party was not remotely a conversional occasion, so she sat him next to her to avoid the danger. But after dinner, as was the custom, the ladies left the room to powder their noses or whatever, leaving the chaps to drink their port before they all joined forces later on in the drawing room. When this moment arrived, our God-botherer found himself sitting on a sofa on the other side of the fireplace from Grizel. After a few minutes she noticed that he was giving his neighbour, a good-looking girl, a fearful going over about the Almighty. She coughed and generally registered short-range disapproval. The God-botherer, realising that he had got it wrong, stopped in mid-sentence and, leaning forward towards Grizel with his elbows on his knees, asked in a surprised voice, ‘But surely, Grizel, you believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ?’ Grizel narrowed her eyes, leaned back a fraction and delivered a stinging rebuke: ‘Never in the drawing room after dinner.’ Which was game, set and match.
Every summer for the last five years of their lives together, before my father put his cue in the rack in 1986, my parents would go for a holiday on a barge on the French canals. It was a fearfully upmarket barge, without a punt pole in sight. At six o’clock each evening they had a glass of champagne on deck, then went up to their cabin to change for dinner, which meant a dinner jacket for Tom and a long skirt for Grizel, before re-emerging to have another glass of champagne. There were always a number of Americans on board who helped make up the numbers. Grizel was suspicious of Americans. She felt that they bounced rather too much. One evening the two of them went up to change for dinner, came down suitably attired and tackled their second glasses of champagne. They had hardly begun when from stage right, a short, middle-aged American in ‘perfectly ghastly rubber shoes’ came bouncing across the deck to Grizel with his arms outstretched, saying in a loud voice, ‘Hi, my name’s Jim. What’s yours?’ This was too much for Grizel who took a step back, mentally at any rate, drew herself up to her full five feet six and a half inches and said in a menacingly firm voice, ‘That, I am afraid, is a private matter, but you may call me Mrs Blofeld.’ I think Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia might well have come up with both those answers.
I have found that the older I become, the more I look back to my origins and see it all in a different perspective even from fifteen years ago. If I seem a little too critical of my parents, it is with my tongue firmly in my cheek. I feel now, more than ever, that the most surprising thing is that these things happened at all. Hoveton was terrific fun, and it would not have been so enjoyable if Tom and Grizel had been other than they were. Their strong personalities